Kenyan Farmers' Fate Caught Up in U.S. Aid Rules That Benefit Agribusiness

By CELIA W. DUGGER

Published: July 31, 2007

As the United States Congress debates an omnibus farm bill, it is considering a small change that advocates say could make a big difference to the world's hungriest people: allowing the federal government to buy some food in Africa to feed the famished, rather than shipping it all overseas from America.

The Bush administration, with odd-bedfellows support from liberal Democrats, has called for allowing the purchase of some food in poor countries to quicken responses to emergencies. But even so, its proposal would not have prevented the paradoxical deepening of hunger here during a long-term project to combat hunger in the harsh, arid reaches of northwestern Kenya.

Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.

The result: American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes.

Ikai Moru, 19, still recalls the hunger that gnawed at her and her mother as they chopped down thorny acacia trees on their tiny plot, hoping one day to reap a bountiful harvest from the parched earth. She watched her mother grow thinner and paler, and finally sicken and die.

''My mother was a very hard worker,'' Ms. Moru offered in a brief epitaph.

Through sheer grit, the 2,000 families finished the irrigation system last year and are successfully farming. But long-term projects to help Africa's rural poor feed themselves are chronically underfinanced, charities say.

Across Africa, the United States is more likely to give people a fish -- caught in America -- that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the United States has donated $136 million worth of American food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent $36 million on agricultural projects to help Kenyan farmers grow and earn more.

And even that small budget for long-term projects in Kenya is expected to dwindle. The United States Agency for International Development, known as Usaid, in seeking to concentrate scarce resources, has dropped Kenya from the list of countries eligible for undertakings like the irrigation project here.

Such efforts are dwarfed by the epic scale of the need. Viewed from a prop plane buzzing like a mosquito overhead, the irrigated land here shimmers as a tiny oasis in a vast, dun-colored landscape.

With the guidance of the Christian charity World Vision, which implemented the project, the families hacked an irrigation system from the barren landscape with machetes, hoes and shovels, clearing 1,000 acres and digging 99 miles of canals along the Kerio River.

Ms. Moru will soon be feeding her four younger brothers and sisters with an abundance of sorghum and corn harvested from their half-acre farm, fulfilling her mother's dream.

The success is noteworthy, but the families' sacrifices also illustrate the risks of an American food aid system that is designed to benefit domestic agribusiness and shipping interests and enmeshed in an intricate framework of farm subsidies.

Members of Congress who favor the current system say the support of influential commercial groups is needed to sustain political support for food aid. They warn that ill-timed purchases of food in Africa in times of scarcity could send food prices higher, harming poor consumers.

But critics in Congress contend that the United States could feed far more people more quickly if it could buy surplus food in Africa. It might also help boost the incomes of African farmers, by providing a market for their crops, they say.

The Bush administration is now trying to change the law so that up to $300 million of food can be bought in poor countries during emergencies.

The Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, where growers and landowners got $1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a $25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid.

Even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee's version of the farm bill includes no such pilot. The committee chairman, Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, said of his members,' ''They're still of the mode that this should be American products we're using our tax dollars to provide them.''

Mr. Peterson's district got $367 million in corn subsidies in 2005, according to government data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.

Even without the American corn that was supposed to keep them going, the families here were determined to grasp their once-in-a-lifetime chance at fertile plots of farmland. Ms. Moru, 14 years old when construction began, recalled how she and her widowed mother had taken on the acacia trees together. They lopped off branches barbed with thorns, burned the trunks and uprooted the stumps.

''It was the heaviest work we had ever done, but we had no choice,'' Ms. Moru said. ''It was the only way to get land to plow.''